How to Make Your Own Superhero

With the popularity of movies such as "Iron Man" and "Watchmen," and with series such as "The Ultimates" by Marvel Comics, superheroes are becoming more accepted as mainstream. This has, of course, led to dozens of games, tabletop and electronic, where a player is allowed to create his own superhero. Here we will show you how do you do it.

Instructions

1. Decide just who your hero is. Powers aside, start with making your hero male or female. Decide on details such as their job, age, socioeconomic status, if they have family ties, a significant other or even children. Things that you'll discover in this process are your hero's attitude, his personality, and maybe even his motivation for wanting to fight crime in the first place.

2. Decide on your hero's powers, such as super strength, agility, speed, the ability to create energy blasts, fly or read someone's mind. In addition to deciding what powers your hero has, you should also decide where she got them, whether it be a scientific accident, magical rupture or a genetic anomaly.

3. Integrate steps 1 and 2. Decide how does the character that you initially made react to their new abilities. For instance, a teenage boy who'd been pushed around his whole life and then developed super strength might push back and go after all those who'd wronged him. Alternatively he could take another path, protecting others from the same treatment. Once you've taken your character's story and given him his powers, it should lead to his motivation. This whole process is called his Origin Story.

4. Design your hero's persona. For instance, if you have a woman who can create bursts of powerful heat energy, an applicable superhero name might be Flashpoint, and she'd have a costume with a fire theme, including lots of red and yellow. Or if you had a character who was a gritty martial arts master, maybe she wouldn't even wear a mask, but instead just intimidate people into keeping silent about her identity. A persona includes how your hero acts, what costume she wears and the entirety of her identity as a hero.

5. Go back through what you've created and make sure that it makes sense. For instance, if a billionaire playboy dresses up as a bat and fights crime with his bare hands, make sure you know what drives him. While a reporter who can read people's minds is neat, she should probably have other training that would help her get to the truth of police corruption. William Jefferson Blake might sound like a name that a costumed crime fighter would have been born with, if you're building his alter ego. Check your details, and make sure your story is straight.

Tips & Warnings

• Keep in mind what kind of crime that your hero will be fighting, and who his villains will be. For an ex-soldier or wandering gunslinger, fighting an entire crime family is believable, and it keeps the story interesting because you don't know if the hero will really win. For Superman to fight those same villains, the story becomes almost laughable. Your hero's power must be balanced by the villains they fight; otherwise they cease to be a hero and become a babysitter at best, a bully at worst.

• Taking inspiration from superheroes in mainstream comics is one thing, but out and out copying them is something else. Don't plagiarize in this creative process.